Forum | Method, Ethics, and Historiography: Tracing a Global Late Antiquity from and beyond Christianity

We spend a lot of time speaking about what we study and how. When putting together the recent conference on “Tracing Christians in Global Late Antiquity,” the organizers wisely decided to open with a panel discussion on method, ethics, and historiography—a topic that opens a space for addressing what we talk about too little, namely, who. Who studies Late Antiquity? Whose identities and positions are tacitly yet trenchantly placed at the telos of the histories we tell? Whose voices are we in the habit of hearing as objective and universal and human as opposed to particular or “diverse”? Whom do we center, and whom we do presume to be just peripheral? Whom do we remember, and whose voices and stories do we relegate to forgetting, in the past and present alike? Such questions, to my view, are not just about ethics and inclusion in the present—although they are about that too. To speak them is also to grapple with how we study the past. To address our ideas about power, identity, and difference in relation to modern scholarly habits and practices of knowing, thus, is perhaps also to rethink the habits of inequity that we embed into our approaches to scholarship as well.

In my own research, I encounter these issues primarily in relation to Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity. Not only are these two typically studied in disciplinary isolation, but each has its own distinctive scholarly lineages. The study of late antique Jews is typically framed narrowly as “Rabbinics” and traced back in its scholarly forms to nineteeth-century German Jewish Wissenschaft des Judentums. The study of the history of Christianity took shape in many quite proximate German (and other European) Christian settings but was nevertheless marked by the systematic forgetting of the vitality of Jews and Judaism (not just in nineteenth-century Germany but ever since Jesus!). And the effects still echo to this day. The study of late antique Christians is the study of “Late Antiquity.” But the study of late antique Jews is the study of “Late Antique Judaism”—at best marked and particular, “included” in a conversation that still takes all its main questions and categories and parameters from Christianity. Augustine is read to speak to “the West” or even what it means to be human. The Mishnah and Talmud remain particular.

Of course, this contrast has roots already in Late Antiquity, including in a Christian heresiology that redefines Jewishness as a marker of Christian error, conceived apart from actual Jews, as well as in the Contra Iudaeos tradition and its discursive marking of Jewishness as particularized difference in the course of arguments for Christian universalism. The ramifications for the history and historiography of the Jews have been much discussed. But no less significant, perhaps, is how this discourse also erased the particularity of late antique Christians. And to this erasure, much of the academic Humanities in the West—including the study of the history of Christianity—arguably remains heir, assuming that Christian categories are universal, and that comparison between “religions” naturally takes place in an arena set by Christian terms and questions. As George Yancy and others have noted of “whiteness” in relation to “race,” perhaps so too for “Christianness” and “religion”: its power is its invisibility, the claim to a neutral gaze of knowledge over others.

Much has been said about the challenge of integrating late antique Jews, as well as Muslims, Manichees, and others, into the study of Late Antiquity. But I think the challenge at hand might also be the opposite. To “trace Christians” in a “Global Late Antiquity” is to grapple with how the global has been too long been framed in Christian terms anyway. In the Western academy, after all, it has long been assumed that the very movement from “Antiquity” to “Middle Ages” to “Modernity” is a story about Christians and Europe, rather than Buddhists or Muslims or even Jews (and any periodization that needs no adjectival clarification—like “Renaissance” and “Enlightenment,” and more recently “Late Antiquity”—does this too). Just as nineteenth-century historians presumed that “World History” had its telos in (or through) European Christianity, so it is still the case that when we talk about “including” Jews and others, we presume that this inclusion is into a Christian story, whether explicitly Christian or crypto-theologically secularized. And it is always certain sorts of European Christianity that are marked as what counts as “Christian” in a sense that can be universal too—and thus Syriac or Ethiopian materials, for instance, are also framed as “included” alterities, as a matter of “diversity,” at best read “in their own terms,” but rarely permitted to set the story of Late Antiquity writ large or even to define the questions for how we approach their counterparts in Greek and Latin.

To think with late antique Christians and “the Global,” thus, might first require quite some acts of undoing how we are accustomed to globalizing certain Christian perspectives anyway. To be sure, I think all this can be hard to see for those of us who work on late antique Christians. After all, the study of premodern Christianity feels really precarious now to many of us, at least in the United States now, due to the shrinkage of permanent positions in this area, sometimes precisely to make space for more global non-Christian perspectives. It remains, however, that in much of Jewish Studies and Religious Studies, the re-imagination of “Antiquity,” now going on, has been largely an act of de-Christianization—showing how Christian heresiological models shaped early research on Judaism and other non-Christian traditions, exposing the particularistic Christian context and content of categories for studying that have been typically treated as if universal or natural, and also the Christian perspectives underpinning colonial European and ostensibly secular Western knowledge-making. It has been a call to unsettle the earlier assumption that Christianity is the presumed perspective from which we see and know other “religions,” and even name what counts as “a religion” and “religious”—as well as the defining structure of the past, which is presumed to follow a path progressively westward towards a secularized Christian-cultural “us” (which, especially with the demographical diversification of the field, is increasingly an “us” that actually doesn’t include a lot of us, not even to mention our students).

And thus to reimagine late antique Christians as newly traced in a Global Late Antiquity is perhaps necessarily first to disembed Christianity’s presumed universalism and epistemological hegemony—at least if we wish to be able to re-embed Christians into a Late Antiquity that does not just “include” others but sees the period through their perspectives, purviews, and positions as well (that is, to “Provincialize Christendom,” as I’ve put it elsewhere). Luckily, however, our evidence for late antique Christians proves especially rich for such an aim of forging a more decentered and multivocal approach to the late antique past. To unsettle the hierarchicalized difference-making that has shaped the Western academy, attention to the heresiological tradition is arguably critical. And for the imagination of other visions of knowledge and difference, in the past and present alike, we might learn much by reconfiguring our conceptual geography of Christians in Late Antiquity, not just gazing from Roman center onto non-Roman peripheries, but seeing the period also from the perspectives of Syria and Ethiopia, while also gazing anew onto Christians as they appear to Jews and others too, with purviews onto different ways of difference-making as well.

Annette Yoshiko Reed is a Professor in the Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies and Department of Religious Studies at New York University.